But The Pirate Bay doesn't want them. Ars Technica has a wonderful "Where is he now?" segment on Hans Pandeya, the man who did everything he could to buy The Pirate Bay and turn it into a legitimate file sharing site. Forget for a moment the challenges of plugging that business model into a site for illegal torrents of movies, videogames and music; Mr. Pandeya has a whole laundry list of problems he has to overcome before he could even think of buying The Pirate Bay.

The Ars piece chronicles the past chicanery, so let's fast-forward to what Pandeya is up to in the present. He moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and on Jan. 19, 2010 acquired a majority stake in a company called Business Marketing Services, Inc. from a Seattle man named Douglas Black. On January 22, Pandeya transferred the company headquarters to Cambridge.

So now, the man who once tried to buy The Pirate Bay was in the calendar business. But the business was kind of a dud to begin with, despite costing him $325,000 for fifteen million shares of issued and outstanding common stock and no real assets. The one benefit to owning the company is that it was publicly traded on the Over the Counter Bulletin Board. The stock jumped to $2.00 a share after its sale.

According to Ars, "On March 12, Business Marketing Services 'acquired source code and other software assets of gTrade, a company organized under the laws of Australia.' This was paid for with a $300,000 promissory note due on May 31, 2010; if the company doesn't have cash, it can pay in its own stock."

What the point of that acquisition was is hard to gauge. But the hits keep coming; earlier this week Business Marketing Services issued a press release saying that it intended to "acquire the domain name thepiratebay.org, and trademarks of The Pirate Bay from Global Gaming Factory X AB (a company he controls) of Sweden." Adding that "The acquisition is subject to GGF's completion of its acquisition of The Pirate Bay which is also expected to occur on June 30, 2010."

The Pirate Bay quickly posted a rebuttal on the site:

"We have no deal with them. We have not even talked to them! Since this is quite heavy fraud and we don't want our users to buy shares or anything like that in a company that is claiming to work with us, we just wanted to point out that this is a lie," said Pirate Bay admins.

Business Marketing Services followed with another press release announcing that the (non-existent) deal was "on hold." Changing gears, Pandeya went back to Sweden, and used GGF to open an arbitration case with the Arbitration Institute of the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce in hopes of gaining "access to the "underlying Domain Name Portfolio including thepiratebay.org and other related domain names in compliance with the Escrow Agreement between Reservella Ltd and GGF." Reservella is the shadowy company that allegedly owns The Pirate Bay, though no one involved can produce a document proving that fact.

This whole crazy saga would make a great movie or at the very least a stunning off-Broadway play. Get the full monty over at Ars Technica.

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ZippyDSMlee: .....win8 hates any left over hidden install partitions from other version of windows....only waste 5 hours finding that out...its ahrder than you think keeping up with 4 or 5 HDDS......03/03/2015 - 4:44am

Matthew Wilson: I am going to pax east, any games you guys want me to check out?03/02/2015 - 11:23pm

ZippyDSMlee: No one remembers the days of Cinemagic and Cynergy eh? :P, meh even MGS is getting to film like....03/02/2015 - 8:44pm

MechaTama31: I was about to get all defensive about liking Metal Gear Solid, but then I saw that he was talking about "cinematic" as a euphemism for "crappy framerate".03/02/2015 - 8:29pm

prh99: Just replace cinematic with the appropriate synonym for poo and you'll have gist of any press release.03/02/2015 - 5:34pm

Monte: Though from a business side, i would agree with the article. While it would be smarter for developers to slow down, you can't expect EA, Activision or ubisoft to do something like that. Nintnedo's gotta get the third party back.02/28/2015 - 4:36pm

Monte: Though it does also help that nintendo's more colorful style is a lot less reliant on graphics than more realistic games. Wind Waker is over 10 years old and still looks good for its age.02/28/2015 - 4:33pm

Monte: With the Wii, nintnedo had the right idea. Hold back on shiny graphics and focus on the gameplay experience. Unfortunatly everyone else keeps pushing for newer graphics and it matters less and less each generation. I can barely notice the difference02/28/2015 - 4:29pm

Monte: ON third party developers; i kinda think they should slow down to nintendo's pace. They bemoan the rising costs of AAA gaming, but then constantly push for the best graphics which is makes up a lot of those costs. Be easier to afford if they held back02/28/2015 - 4:27pm

Matthew Wilson: http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2015/02/28/the-world-is-nintendos-if-only-theyd-take-it/ I think this is a interesting op-ed, but yeah it kind of is stating the obvious.02/28/2015 - 2:52pm